Pardon Me If I'm Having A Bad Chi Day

Get Serious!

It's bad enough that my eyes are growing weak, my feet hurt and my digestion isn't what is used to be. Now I'm also stuck with a case of bad "chi."

Bad what, you ask? Read on.

I found out about my chi problem recently from my co-worker, Mark Erickson. You may recall that Mark did an article for our Home section this spring in which he interviewed a local expert in the ancient Chinese art of "feng shui."

Feng shui, to summarize it as briefly as possible, is the practice of positioning buildings and their walls, doors, windows and furnishings in the correct relationship to each other. If the relationship is correct, according to the ancient Chinese, it promotes harmony in your chi, which is the vital energy within you that reacts to the flow of energy through your surroundings.

But if things are in the wrong position, the chi will be disrupted, which can cause psychic discomfort and lots of other problems.

I imagine some of you are skeptical about this, but I'm not sure I'd ignore what those ancient Chinese had to say about anything. Those old guys knew a lot of stuff. Hey, these were the people who figured out how to cook hundred-year-old eggs.

Since he'd done this article, we now considered Mark our office's resident authority on feng shui. So we asked him to point out for us what was wrong about our office, which was plenty. When he came to my desk, he shook his head.

"You probably have some terrible turbulence in your chi," he said.

Apparently I have the worst desk, from the feng shui standpoint, in the whole office.

While there are several things wrong with my desk, the worst thing is that I'm sitting with my back to one of the entrances to our office, the door being just a few feet away, behind me and to the right. This means that all day long, people are going in and out, passing right behind my back. This roils up my chi something awful. Bad vibrations, as the Beach Boys might have said.

Actually, this has bothered me ever since I moved to this desk years ago, but I thought it was just the annoyance of having people walking and talking a few feet behind my head. On those few brief occasions when I tried to concentrate on my work, this would distract me terribly. I thought I was being overly sensitive, but now that I know there's an ancient Oriental explanation for it, I can feel that my annoyance is justified.

I was told I could alleviate the problem somewhat by hanging a mirror on the partition in front of me. This would deflect some of the turbulence and calm down my chi a bit.

I don't know about that. Somehow, I think having to stare at myself at close range while I'm trying to write will do my psyche more harm than good.

Maybe I'll just hang a little rear-view mirror on my desk. It may not affect the chi flow a lot, but at least I'll be able to see who's standing behind me.

Apart from that, it looks like I'm stuck with bad workplace chi, so I'm trying to look on the positive side:

This could make a great excuse.

Face it, everybody likes to have a good excuse when things aren't going right, and this could be mine.

When the writing's going slowly and my brain refuses to function - it does this frequently, especially when it's a lovely, balmy day outside - I could say, "My chi is acting up again. I need to get out of the office for a while."

And when one of you readers call up, as you sometimes do, to offer your helpful, constructive comments that my column in that day's paper was the dumbest thing you'd ever read, I could respond: